Bringing the State Back In: Retrospect and ProspectThe 2007 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture

Taking off from theoretical and research agendas encouraged in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In , this article traces developments in several areas of scholarship: studies of social revolutions and regime transformations; studies of the development of welfare states; and studies of social capital and democratic effectiveness. In all of these literatures, the author's own research and the research of many other scholars has been enriched by analyses of state-building and of the changing capacities of states to achieve particular goals, as well as by tracing 'policy feedbacks' over time. The original scholarly program called for a 'Weberian' approach to states as independent actors and for a 'Tocquevillian' emphasis on the ways that state structures and actions indirectly affect the ideas, goals and capacities of social groups in politics. The former approach remains relevant, and the latter has proved increasingly fruitful. Particularly vibrant areas of state-society research now focus on the struggles over social policies in mature welfare states and on the political, as well as sociocultural, roots of social capital and democratic citizen engagement.